He loves the clatter of wheels on steel rails, the mournful wail of the whistle, the trail of smoke from a steam engine.

“I’m into trains,” he said during a recent interview.

Some people with a similar interest might head to a train depot when the schedule calls for a train to pass through.

McMurtrey just climbs the stairs to a second-floor room of a garage next to his Asheboro home where he can watch and listen — to his heart’s content — as his collection of model trains chug into and out of the little community of Critter Creek, population 207.

He built the town and most of the buildings in it — a hardware store, diner, doughnut shop, mobile-home park, a gas station, a little white church and a cemetery. There are personal touches, too: Bob’s Used Cars (named after himself); Judi’s Law (for his wife); J&J Iron Works (for Judi and their daughter, Jenelle); and Gary’s Vintage Bikes (homage to their son).

“I try to find things (that) if you were riding the train you would see going by,” he explained.

The little make-believe world has a movie house (Coming Soon: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train”), a sawmill and a circus train delivering lions, gorillas and bears to an outdoor carnival, complete with a working Ferris wheel. There’s a carousel in the construction stage on a worktable downstairs.

McMurtrey, a retired electrical contractor, meticulously fashioned tiny fences, telephone poles, a telephone booth, picnic tables and an old cannon in a park. He made a bandstand out of a birdhouse.

His nephew, Clay Trotter of Asheboro, painted the walls around the room, adding trees, mountains, a two-lane blacktop disappearing in the distance, as well as other landscape features — a covered bridge, a bolt of lightning on the horizon.

McMurtrey added miniature people, cars and trucks.

He has more than 100 vehicles from different decades and can dramatically alter the look of his layout by swapping out the vehicles, replacing, for instance, cars and trucks from the 1950s with models from the 1920s.

And, of course, there are the trains.

He had tiny HO trains as a child; those models are about 1:87 scale. His grown-up toys are G scale, about a twenty-fifth (or so) the size of the real thing. He has 11 engines and about 70 cars of different kinds.

In California, where he lived and worked for decades, he had his trains set up in his back yard, some 200 feet of tracks weaving through the bushes and trees. These days he doesn’t have to worry about pets knocking the model off the tracks like he did then.

He has done his fair share of riding trains, too, from California and Colorado to West Virginia and North Carolina. That’s steam trains. Diesel trains do not tickle his fancy.

“I rode the one in eastern Texas that they actually let you go up in the engine,” he said. “To hear that sound when they blow that whistle, it actually sends chills up your spine.”

Judi McMurtrey is not as big a train fan as her husband is, although she goes along for the ride on the rail trips and she is constantly on the lookout for train memorabilia for him.

She patiently endures his hobby and the hours he spends thinking about his trains, building new elements for his train domain, or, most of all, perhaps, playing with his trains.

“She said it keeps me out of the briars,” he said, grinning.

A visitor wondered how McMurtrey decided how many folks “live” in the fictional town he calls Critter Creek.